BMW 3/15 Classic Cars for Sale

The BMW 3/15 is the first car that was ever produced by the now firmly established BMW company. It entered production in 1927 in its first iteration, the Dixi 3/15 DA-1, and cycled through another two main-line versions and an offshoot called the BMW 3/15 DA-3 Wartburg before finally being discontinued in 1932.

History of the BMW 3/15

The 3/15 DA-1, the first of the BMW 3/15 cars, was initially not produced by BMW at all. It was born from a contract between Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach (an existing German car-maker) and the Austin Motor Company to manufacture a vehicle based on the Austin 7, an extremely popular economy car in the British market that was still in production at the time, for the German market. The result was the Dixi 3/15 DA-1, a sturdy 4-cylinder car with a top speed of 75 km/h that improved on the British version with Bosch shock absorbers and metric fasteners. When BMW bought Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach in 1928, they recognized the potential of this early creation and re-branded it the BMW 3/15 DA-2 for its next iteration, the BMW 3/15 DA-2. This 1929 version had improved foot brakes which worked on both the front and back wheels, as well as larger tyres, though its performance was the same as the earlier version. In 1931, a final version, the BMW 3/15 DA-4, was released; this last vehicle used independent front suspension and had a bolder, more original design than the first two models, which had not greatly diverged from the base Austin 7 design. This was an important step toward the production of the company’s first wholly original vehicle, the BMW 3/20, in the following year.

The BMW 3/15 DA-3 Wartburg

As the BMW 3/15 generated more and more financial gain for the new automaker, the natural next step was to start refining the design into specialized 3/15s that could capture a wider share of the car market. The only attempt at doing this resulted in the BMW 3/15 DA-3 Wartburg, a version which reimagined the original Dixi car as a sports roadster. It was the first sports car BMW ever created, signalling the company’s intentions to shift to the upmarket image which would later define the BMW brand. Unfortunately, the introduction of the Wartburg coincided too closely with the onset of the Great Depression, and the extremely low demand for sports cars made it overly difficult for the car to gain the necessary sales numbers to justify its continued production. Only 150 BMW 3/15 Wartburgs were ever sold by the time the model was discontinued in 1931.